Shareaholic: Facebook still drives the most traffic, but Pinterest is a contender

Today, social discovery and sharing platform Shareaholic released its quarterly report detailing traffic stats from eight of its largest social media websites for Q3 of 2014. As has been the case for a while now, Facebook is the main social media source of traffic by a huge margin.

In fact, Facebook still pushes over 22 percent of traffic on average. Its closest follower, Pinterest, is over four times less, at 5 percent, while Twitter is now down to less than one percent of referrals.

The chart above details the changes throughout the quarter more precisely, with the two rightmost columns displaying the overall difference in the amount of visits gained or lost through each platform.

Shareaholic sources its data from over 300,000 websites for a total clout of over 400 million users. These sites range from small independent blogs to large commercial websites of varying audiences, giving it a powerful sample size to create its data.

Year over year, Facebook’s influence grew 115 percent and Pinterest 50 percent, while Twitter decreased 24 percent. Despite having the most established user base, Facebook continues to drive more traffic due to a general increase in social media traffic referrals – people rely less on search engines and other sources to get the news they care about now.

Pinterest’s influence is notable, however, given that its network is only comprised of about 70 million users – Facebook dials in at over a billion.

Twitter, on the other hand, seems to have plateaued. Since September of 2013, its share of social media referrals has fallen from 1.17 percent to just 0.88 percent.

Meanwhile StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google Plus, YouTube, and LinkedIn remain forgettable for traffic. For September, their combined contribution was less than Twitter’s alone.